Sadness that drives snow queen

By Simon Hart

12:01AM BST 15 Oct 2006

Does A bit of adversity in your life make you a stronger athlete? Chemmy Alcott, a devourer of sporting autobiographies, has been pondering that question a lot recently, though the answer should become clearer when the World Cup ski season begins on an Austrian glacier next weekend. Will her own pain bring gain on the slopes?

Alcott, Britain's top female skier, is the first to admit she has had a charmed life. Wealthy parents, skiing holidays from an early age, posh schools, faultless exam results, glamorous looks, lucrative sponsorship deals, two Olympic Games under her belt and still only 24 years old.

In Turin in February, her career reached a new high in the Olympic downhill when she crossed the finish line in the silver medal position with a run of courage bordering on recklessness.

But then things started to go wrong. A couple of weeks after Turin, Alcott drove back to her home in Twickenham following an event in Austria. She arrived exhausted 17 hours later and threw herself into bed.

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When she woke the next day she turned on her mobile phone and found it bursting with voice and text messages.

One message, from her elder brother Rufus, urged her to call immediately. Another was a text from a friend that read: "I am so sorry to hear the news. May the angels be with you."

Confused, tearful but too frightened to call anyone, Alcott drove to her brother's house in nearby Putney, where the news was broken to her. Her mother, Eve, had died suddenly at the age of 59.

It was a total shock. Alcott had only been chatting to her mother the previous day on the long drive from Austria. She had arrived home to find a note on her kitchen table that said: "Chemmy, hope you had a good journey. Give me a ring, love Eve."

Alcott, who always called her mother by her Christian name, still shudders at the memory of the high of Turin followed so quickly by the low of her mother's death, though she now sees something positive in their cruel proximity.

"It sounds crazy but it is something I would never change because Eve was there in Turin and she got to share that with me," she says.

"She was so close to not coming to the Olympics. She had financial worries and she wouldn't let us contribute because she was a very proud woman.

"Then she remembered how much she regretted not coming to Salt Lake City [the 2002 Olympics] and she decided to come out.

"I can't imagine what it would have been like not being able to share the experience with my mother.

"It was very strange. It is as if it was going to happen. She died really suddenly and we didn't even know she was ill.

"A couple of weeks before she died she went to New York to see my brother. It was as if she had a lot of closure in her life, including seeing her daughter at the Olympics."

Alcott has had plenty of time to rationalise those turbulent few weeks last winter. To add to her problems, she went under the surgeon's knife in April to fix a congenital problem with her feet. Her toes were curved "like bananas", which had the knock-on effect of causing painful bunions.

The recovery target was three months but, during physiotherapy, she fell during a balance exercise and re-broke her left foot, adding a further two months to her recuperation.

Now, at last, she hopes her fortunes have turned. She has been back on skis for just three weeks, training in the Swiss resort of Saas-Fee, but is delighted with her progress, even if she may have to miss the opening World Cup race in Solden due to lack of preparation time. She is also about to sign a new four-year sponsorship deal with the investment company, Witan. "It's gone amazingly well," she says. "On our first day of giant-slalom training on the steep the other day I was really fast. It's really different to be skiing without pain. I guess I have been suppressing pain for the last four years and not realising it."

But what of the other pain? How will Alcott cope with the stresses of a sport that is as much a test of psychological as physical strength?

"Eve and I had exactly the same dreams for my skiing and because she's not here, it doesn't take away my ambition or motivation," she says. "It almost gives me that chip on my shoulder that some people say that athletes need.

"A lot of athletes have gone through hardship. I've read a lot of athlete autobiographies. In fact, I would say I'm obsessed with them.

"One of the common links is that so many of them have really been tested in life, whereas I've been given things on a plate.

"Yet you hear about people like Jason Robinson, who had to get over alcoholism, and Lance Armstrong and his battle with cancer."

Alcott believes she inherited her fierce competitive streak from her mother, who had aspirations of swimming in the Olympics until her sporting career was cut short by injury.

"My mother didn't know a great deal about ski racing but she did know how much effort I put into it and she told me I deserved to be on the podium," she says.

"After she died I read a piece about Venus Williams and how when she lost her older sister she didn't think she could play tennis and she took a whole year off. But that would go against everything that Eve believed in to do that."